#essayistic

April 30th - May 2nd marked the World Cinema and the Essay Film conference which I had the pleasure of talking at (will upload paper soon). The highlights for me would be the two keynote addresses by Timothy Corrigan and Thomas Elsaesser. I’ll focus on the keynotes for this post and will post some other highlights over the next few days. There were so many talks, and films that it feels a bit overwhelming with lots of ideas and things to look up sprouting from the various talks I saw. 

What was good about the two keynote addresses was the conversation which existed between them. Corrigan looked at essayistic moments which occur in narrative cinema, which he called essayisms, whilst Elsaesser looked at how the essay film is symptomatic of the current media and sociological climate, where almost everything is now labelled an essay film, including our facebook news feeds. Their talks were therefore very different Corrigan attempting to confine the definition of what an essay film is, and Elsaesser suggesting the vagueness of the essay film is it’s biggest strength. Elsaesser looking at online figurations of the essay film (mainly YouTube), and Corrigan looking at two narrative film case studies being Mallick’s The Tree of Life, and Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross.

I want to briefly talk about both of them, and try to confine this post to simply thinking about what each of them talked about in reference to what I’ve thought about around the essay film. Corrigan, in his talk referenced three different ways of thinking about the essay film, as: essay film, essayistic in nature, or of having essayisms. What is perhaps most interesting here, and what he discussed at length is the essayism (a term he borrowed from Harrison). Corrigan, described an essayism as a digressive technique which arrests narrative movement pulling away from the narrative to generate a new type of knowledge which exceeds narrative comprehension. He then went on to consider the essayism in Mallick and Majewski’s films. This was more-or-less what Corrigan discussed throughout his presentation, and as I listened I could not help but connect the essayism with Deleuze’s affect-image as a shot which exceeds the narrative. The affect-image as a moment of pause in narrative which generates contemplative thought, and Corrigan’s essayism described as a rest in narrative mobility to allow for contemplative thought - new ways of seeing. Corrigan describes both Mallick’s and Majewski’s films as films of digressions and distractions. What was difficult about Corrigan’s talk was his emphasis on textual analysis of the two films without showing excerpts from them. It was hard to visualise an essayism without seeing them. I guess I will have to watch the films to see if my idea that the affect-image and essayism are similar is correct because it would be a nice thing to bring into my research, since what I largely talked about in my speech was how essay films brought into the context of interactive online video allow for a larger sense of affective knowing.

Elsaesser’s keynote was quite different in that he showed quite a lot of video, mainly YouTube videos and excerpts from essay films. He referenced a lot more sources and didn’t try to grapple too much with what an essay film is. Elsaesser did, however, consider an essay film to be a development of an idea, rather than a narration of a story, to generate thought. He distinguished the essay film from documentary because essay films have a looser relationship to the real. Elsaesser, in his speech wanted to move away from the usual examples which make up the essay film, towards more contemporary examples to consider the essay film as symptomatic of the social global climate, art and festival culture, politics as subjective, changes in technology, online personalities, and as a mode to revitalise the novel. A key point throughout his speech being that the essay film brings together the art exhbition space and film festival space. An essay film rests between exhibition and festival with the ability to co-occupy both spaces. In terms of the online environment, which is what I am mainly interested in, he talked about how the distributed online environment becomes a platform to perform distributed personalities. Distributed personalities as a characteristic of the essayistic form. This point aligning with i-docs scholars on polyvocality and the online. He further noted, through a YouTube video which curates, rather humorously, YouTube users asking for video ideas. He discussed the curation of these clips as allowing each of the people asking for ideas to be part of a shared community yet still exist independently. What I liked about Elsaesser’s talk was, as a cinema scholar, his optimistic view of the online environment as providing this positive space to perform the essay film, and his suggestion that almost everything online can be described as an essay film (at one point talking of a facebook newsfeed as a neverending essay film). He finished his talk by suggesting the essay film is symptomatic of new media.

This was a subject I stumbled over when I wrote my entry yesterday, so I wrote something up for it today.

(more…)